S. Craig Zahler And The Ineffable Unfairness of Life

The most controversial flick from the recently concluded Venice Film Festival (non-flag-on-the-moon category) was probably Dragged Across Concrete. The new film from S. Craig Zahler was always likely to be provocative, given its star (Mel Gibson) and subject matter (a pair of racist cops, one of whom is Gibson, go rogue to score some quick money).

Reviews out of Venice were mixed; the Daily Beastheadlined Marlow Stern’s “Mel Gibson’s New Police Brutality Movie Is a Vile, Racist Right-Wing Fantasy,” while RogerEbert.com’s Glenn Kenny praised Zahler for his “great patience and devilish craft.” Having not seen it, I will not offer an opinion either way. Instead, I’d encourage those curious about the kerfuffle to check out Zahler’s previous films—Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99, both of which are available on Amazon Prime—in order to get a sense for his aesthetic and understand why a certain level of angst was likely inevitable.

Bone Tomahawk is often described as “western-horror,” but it plays like a pretty straightforward western with some grindhouse moments; leaving aside the design of the villains, it’s not much more horrifying than, say, Ulzana’s Raid. After the town nurse, Samantha O’Dwyer (Lili Simmons), is kidnapped by a renegade tribe of inbred, cannibalistic Indians, Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) leads her husband, Arthur (Patrick Wilson), deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), and gunman John Brooder (Matthew Fox) on a seemingly doomed mission to bring her home.

The inbred clan of “troglodytes,” as one native American describes them with disgust, that has taken Mrs. O’Dwyer and a few other townsfolk look a bit like The Lord of the Rings‘s Uruk-hai and speak with otherworldly shrieks rather than words. Their treatment of captives is legendary not just within the universe of the film, where we are told that Hunt and co have no chance against them: if you Google “Bone Tomahawk,” the first autofill suggestion is “scene.” It is definitely one of those movies with That Scene, and while I won’t spoil That Scene here, I will suggest it is not suitable for those with a weak stomach.

The savagery of the troglodytes is just an extension of the moral universe of Zahler’s film, which treats difficulty as the default fact of life. More arduous than That Scene, at least for this reviewer, was the simple fact that Arthur O’Dwyer is forced to travel across the wilderness after his beloved sporting a badly broken leg, one that seems on the verge of snapping every time he hops off his horse. There’s a casual cruelty about the world’s indifference to O’Dwyer’s difficulties—one leavened only by his faith and the film’s finale.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 features calculated, rather than casual, cruelty, but the same sense of ineffable unfairness pervades. Bradley—not Brad—Thomas (Vince Vaughn) is a recovering alcoholic who gets laid off from his job at a towing company as the film starts; upon returning home early, he learns his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) is having an affair. Needless to say, Bradley is upset. So he does what any man might do: with his bare hands, he dismantles his wife’s car. Punches through the windshield; annihilates the rearview mirror; tears the hood off. You know that bonus round in Street Fighter 2 where you can destroy a car for points? Like that. But real.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 is surprisingly funny—Vaughn’s timing on his deadpans is simply perfect—and the absurdity of this scene adds to the darkly comic tone while serving a serious purpose: watching Bradley punching through glass and ripping a car apart demonstrates that he has an incredibly high pain tolerance and is ridiculously strong. As such, we aren’t too surprised as the film progresses and he brushes off baton blows, shrugs off shrapnel, and produces compound fractures in his enemies at will. Without spoiling too much, he’ll need that toughness after heading into prison following a drug pickup gone bad.

The villains and heroes of Brawl in Cell Block 99 can help one understand why some critics were apprehensive about Dragged Across Concrete. Brawl is a movie about a southern guy who loves the American flag (he owns two!) and finds himself up against murderous Mexican drug dealers, a creepy German who informs him that his wife has been kidnapped after he lands in prison, and a Korean abortionist threatening to do the unthinkable to his now-pregnant wife and the baby she is carrying. There’s a reason reactionaries such as myself have cottoned to this picture and its predecessor.

Zahler’s movies can be hard to watch, and not just because of the gore-heavy special effects that would be at home in an Eli Roth flick. There’s a chest-tightening tension that pervades both Bone and Brawl: he never goes easy on his characters or his viewers. The experience isn’t always pleasant, but it’s never forgettable—and I can’t wait to see what he has in store for us next.